|
|
 |
Feature
|
| Click Here to go back. |
Globe and Mail, Feature >>
Seu Jorge's propulsive (though thin) set had the jazz festival crowd dancing in the aisles.
The Vancouver climate: Clear skies, complex sounds
JAZZ
The Vancouver International Jazz Festival Featuring Seu Jorge, E.S.T. and Mats Gustafsson In Vancouver Friday and Saturday
REVIEWED BY J.D. CONSIDINE
The weather for the opening of the 21st Vancouver International Jazz Festival couldn't have been more perfect or more superfluous.
Warm, sunny days under brilliant blue skies may be perfect for big, outdoor con certs, but big, outdoor concerts aren't quite per fect for the Vancouver festival. The emphasis here is on innovation and improvisation, and those qualities require a certain intimacy. Other festivals can have their sun and fun; the folks in Vancouver are here to listen.
Well, most of the time, anyway. While much of the festival is given over to some of the most gifted, cutting-edge improvisers in jazz, there is room for at least a few performers who just wan na have fun. Seu Jorge, for example. A major recording star- at home, the Brazilian singer/songwriter is known north of the border for his samba re makes of David Bowie tunes in the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Naturally, Jorge in cluded a couple on Friday (including a surpris ingly sloppy ZiggyStardust), but for the most part he focused on his Brazilian hits, much to the crowd's delight.
Jorge's set was a bit like a Brazilian carnival costume short on material and stretched em barrassingly thin at points, but entertaining nonetheless. Backed by three percussionists (one of whom doubled on the tiny, guitar-like cava- quino), his sound was lean and propulsive, and literally had them dancing in the aisles at the Centre for Performing Arts.
Still, even those party animals were happy to sit in rapt attention to the Swedish trio E.S.T. Fronted by pianist Esbjorn Svensson, E.S.T. is hardly a standard jazz trio; not only do the three frequently improvise over repetitious riffs, like a rock band, they also occasionally use electronic effects to alter the sound of their otherwise acoustic instruments.
Dan Berglund wowed the crowd with a wah- wah bass solo on Mingle in the Mincing-Ma- Chine, but it was the overall impact of E.S.T.'s approach, particularly Svensson's tuneful, well- crafted compositions and elegant, Keith Jarrett- like solos, that ultimately had the audience on its feet, demanding an encore.
E.S.T. represents only one pole of the festival's sizable Scandinavian contingent. At the other pole is saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, a specialist in free improvisation who appeared in a number of formats. Some were themselves improvisa tions, as Saturday when he was paired with Van couver pianist Paul Plimley and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love after a planned col laboration with dancer Lotta Melin was cancelled due to illness.
Gustafsson is a saxophonist of the shriek and honk variety, and while his experiments outside the envelope of conventional melody were thrill ing when refracted through wry lyricism of Plim- ley's piano, they assumed a grating tedium later Saturday at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, where he played with Zu, an electric Italian trio given to maddeningly tedious boom-whacka- boom riffs and electronic noise.
Fortunately, Zu was followed immediately by the NOW Orchestra featuring Marilyn Crispell. Canada's premier avant-garde big band, NOW draws as freely from contemporary classical techniques as from the standard big band vocab ulary, and their performance particularly the pointedly topical West Side Stomp was an of ten thrilling melange of intricate ensemble pas sages and hair-raising improvisation.
Don't get the wrong idea, though not all the festival's new music was wild, woolly and with out rules. Wayne Horvitz and Robin Holcomb offered a piano recital Saturday at the Western Front that, while clearly taking a vanguard ap proach to jazz, emphasized song structure and melodic development over happenstance and unconventionality. In particular, the two seem especially well grounded in the folk song tradi tion, and concluded their performance with lovely rendition of Stephen Foster's Hard Times. 06/26/06
|
| Click Here to go back. |
|
 |
|
|
|
